Heal the Sick, Raise the Dead

by Jacob Prytherch

  We marked the two graves with crossed branches tied with the guide ropes, used despite Eliza's disgust at the role they had previously played in the diorama of the dead, as there was nothing else to hand. I placed the photograph from the police station on Hannah's grave, as it was the least I could do to try and make amends, though as soon as she saw it Juliet ran forward and claimed it for herself, running back to the car cradling it as if it was an injured bird. I felt guilt weigh me down again as I realised I should have given it to her immediately. I truly had no idea how to function within society. Perhaps I had always been an outcast, even before I arrived at that island...

  It was not long afterwards that Eliza told the others, as coolly as she could, that she and I were heading into the forest to look for some wildlife or other source of food for the onward journey. She was still carrying the shotgun loosely in the crook of her arm as she nodded her head towards the trees. I followed without a word, ashamed to even look back.

  We walked for several minutes, her in the lead and me following close behind, picking our way through ferns and grasses, up ridges and down into leaf filled dips, through tangles of roots and brackish puddles. She never looked back, never checked if I was following, even though I was sure she was listening for some sign of my trying to escape, looking for a reason to shoot and finally be rid of me.

  As we walked, the weather once again began to turn. A chill wind swept down, starting to drive raindrops at us as we clambered up a ridge, moving up through the tree line, until finally we arrived at the top of a small hillock. It was bare and exposed, putting me in mind of a bald man's head, a patch of blasted earth dotted with scrawny tufts of grass. The rain was thundering down now, starting to soak both of us to the core.

  “Shouldn't we go back?” I said, shivering involuntarily.

  “No, not us, not ever, not together,” she replied, holding the gun towards me. Rain dripped from its barrel, leaving rainbow puddles of gun oil on the ground. “This is a conversation I've wanted to have for a long time. Maybe if we had already had it then what you did last night may not have happened,” she said coldly. The rain was thundering so hard I was struggling to hear her words.

  I stayed silent as she scrutinised my eyes, looking for something in my features though I had no idea what.

  “Aren't you going to say anything?” she asked finally. “Don't you know what this is about?”

  (Yes.) “No,” I said instantly, without thinking, aware that it was the wrong answer. She was here to discuss my sickness, our sickness, my twisted relationship with the other three. Something was growing in my mind, a quick white hot thought that flashed from temple to temple.

  “You do, I can see it,” she said, her eyes showing more wrinkles than usual as she squinted in the storm. Her hair was slick to her head, pressed down by the water.

  “It's about those three, the three that follow you, or that you follow... I don't know how it works. I tried the softly-softly approach but you don't get any better, never any better.”

  “She certainly doesn't have a problem with confrontation does she?” said Marcus, standing behind Eliza, flexing his hands behind her neck. The coat of skin that he was wearing dripped blood that mixed with the rain, spreading red across the dome of the hillock. I spotted Cato crawling out from behind a fern in the tree line, skittering sideways like a crab. The disease had returned. I felt my mind starting to fall away. I couldn't stop them. (Are you sure?)

  “She's trouble, always has been, always will be,” said the tiny man, before blowing on his thumb and growing to his usual height in a heartbeat. The rain was soaking them also, dripping off their bodies or maybe through their bodies... what was I seeing? I turned my head to look for Perdita, the final player in the act...

  “Oh, she's here, don't worry,” said Marcus. “She's never far away.”

  “You did this...” I said under my breath. Eliza hung her head, shaking it with what looked like bitter disappointment.

  “Of course we did, Cato and I both answer to her.” said Marcus, almost apologetically. “She wanted us to point the way but you didn't want to talk to us, to your family. We had to send you a message...”

  “Look at me, just me!” yelled Eliza, waving the shotgun in front of my face. She pushed it into my chest painfully. At this range, I doubted the stab vest would do anything to help me. The rain was so heavy now I was almost breathing it in, having to spit it away from my face. It stung my eyes painfully as it dripped down my features.

  “There is no way this can carry on,” she said, almost having to shout to make herself heard. Marcus came to stand next to her, sliding the coat off and letting it fall to the ground in a ragged heap, leaving his torso bare. As I looked, the coat seemed to sprout seven or eight small arms, dragging itself away across the earth. I shook my head to clear the sickening image.

  “No? You disagree?” said Eliza, her lip curling in anger. “After what you did to the bodies of those poor women, you think you can stay with us?”

  “She's going to do you in,” said Marcus, his voice a conspiratorial whisper that somehow cut through the sound of the rain to be perfectly audible.

  “No,” I said, my eyes widening as I saw Marcus raising his hands towards her throat. I started to raise mine too, ready to intervene. Eliza placed the shotgun to my eye level.

  “Don't force me, please,” she said, her eyes pleading with me, as if I could stop it. (You can.)

  “Eliza, what can I do?” I asked, almost wailing. It was a yell of pure childish helplessness. Whatever they were, however they had come about, their deeds were real. The results of their actions were terrifying. The fact that only I could see them and yet do nothing to stop them was a burden fit to crush me. (You can.)

  “I don't know, I don't... I've tried to think of a way to solve this since the station, I’ve run it over and over in my head but I don't know, I just can't think of a solution,” she continued, her anger dissolving in the deluge.

  She lowered the gun, the raindrops running together in rivulets down her cheeks. Her eyes were red tinged, and though the rain made it impossible to be certain, I'm sure she was crying.

  “You tell me, doctor. Is there anywhere we can go from here that won't end in death?”

  “There is violence in the air, hot and heavy. She's dead, or you are,” said Cato, running up my arm and crouching on my shoulder. “Marcus will save you, don't worry. It's his reason for being. He'll twist her neck until it pops...”

  Marcus grunted, black hairs bursting from his skin, his face, shoulders, back, arms, all in a cloud of red droplets, spraying blood. His bellow seemed to echo around the woods as he reached for Eliza with inhuman speed.

  “No!” I yelled, lunging for his arms. Eliza tried to bring the shotgun up but I knocked her aside. She fell sideways, slipping on the mud as I bull-rushed into Marcus, smashing him backwards. I drove and drove, until he span away into the darkness at the side of the hill, tumbling down between the trees, his body smashing from trunk to trunk as he fell. I tried to halt my momentum but I had put too much into my attack. My boot slipped on a slick tree root and I tumbled after him, hitting my shoulder and head on the trunk of a tree, fern cracking... rain... slip... taste of dirt... blood... black...

  I remembered pressing my face, feeling stickiness, rubbing the tackiness between my fingers in dazed fascination. My body shook with tremors but it took a while before I realised that I was freezing. Despite the cold my shoulder felt as if it were burning, even though I couldn't connect the movement of my hand with the pain, until a fresh wave of agony flashed across my skull and my eyes flickered open.

  The rain was beating a staccato on my body, pushing me into the mud with each raindrop. I craned my neck forwards a little, seeing a few dead leaves on my body. As I raised my hand I saw blood, slowly being washed from my palm as I held it up. I tried to move again but my shoulder protested as I tried to roll left. I fell back, gasping a little, my legs shifting uselessly, sliding over the wet gr
ound. When I felt ready, I tried rolling to my right, managing to get half way before needing a moment's rest, my head falling sideways onto the ground again. Looking back I could see water already pooling in the depression where I had previously lain. I tilted my head slightly to look up the slope, seeing a mass of roots and ferns, their leaves glistening and bobbing in the rainfall.

  I pulled my arm around slowly but as I pressed the bloody palm into the earth the pain in my left shoulder again flared up, so I had to leave it to hang uselessly as I pushed myself up using only my right arm, eventually managing to tuck my knees up under me before standing up in a series of slow, methodical steps.

  When I was finally on my feet and able to look around, the memory of how I had arrived flashed across my mind's eye. I looked up. The sky visible through the branches above was a subdued and sombre grey but I had no idea whether it was from the storm clouds or the retreat of daylight. Maybe the leaves had fallen with me as I had crashed down the slope or maybe they had fallen on my body over the course of hours. I checked my left shoulder and face with my right hand, also moving my left arm to check the range of motion available. I seemed to have broken my collarbone in the fall, also gaining a large cut in my scalp that had bled quite vigorously, as they always did due to the thinness of the skin and amount of blood vessels.

  I took one or two tentative steps but my legs seemed to be relatively fine, if stiff and lethargic from the cold.

  I had no way of knowing which way to go but away from the slope seemed the most likely. The rain made hearing most other sounds impossible, so I had no way of registering any slowly shuffling footsteps if the dead were going to choose to find me. I wasn't sure I even cared anyway. I was just walking, no obvious aim or direction. Eliza was... where? I had no idea. Even if I did, would she care where I was?

  I skidded down a small slope towards a stream, my boots splashing into the rippling water. I sat down for a moment to catch my breath, before dipping my hands in and drinking. It was quite dirty, mud washed with rainwater into a gulley, yet I was so thirsty that I drank until I felt fit to burst before lying back to recover my strength a little. When I felt ready it still took a while for me to pull myself up the other side, pushing with my legs as best I could whilst trying to negotiate some slippery roots one handed. Beyond the lip of the bank the trees continued, with no paths visible through the brambles and ferns to guide my way. I moved onwards, as it was my only option apart from lying still and waiting to die, which had its own appeal admittedly. I was worse off here, right here and now, than I had been on the island. The depressing nature of that thought made it very hard to continue, and yet I did continue for some reason.

  My relationship with Eliza had been brief, fiery and complicated. Threat. Forgiveness. Trust given and trust betrayed. Was that how all relationships were? I hadn't felt I'd even had the time to work out where we stood, it was just one thing rolling into another, no time to think, just action leading to reaction, to reaction, to reaction...

  A strip of grey had begun to replace the darkness that clung between the trees ahead and after a few more minutes I finally emerged from the forest to find a wire fence crawling with bind weed and beyond it a road going from left to right. On the other side of the road there was a high grassy ridge stretching in both directions towards more trees. The tarmac was wet, dull and grey, with bits breaking off at the edges as it encroached on the soft wooded earth, but it was a welcome sight nonetheless. It was a line, a purpose.

  After a few failed and painful missteps, I managed to negotiate the fence, tumbling over onto the roadside. As I glanced from left to right, both ways looked equally dark and full of unknown promise. I decided to go right, as it was slightly down hill and my legs were suffering from the uneven ground I had been covering. My feet were also starting to complain with every step, the water that filled my boots swelling the skin of my soles uncomfortably.

  I followed the road at an agonizingly slow pace as I couldn't push myself to go any faster. I eventually spotted a red hatchback at the side of the road next to the wood on my right, collapsed into a ditch with the bonnet wrapped around a tree. The windscreen was a fractal mess, obscuring details within, so I turned to make my way towards it, curiosity getting the better of me. As I got nearer, I could see the drying blood through the web of cracks on both the door windows and the windscreen and it wasn't long before I heard the low moan of a corpse.

  Whether it was the pain or not I don't know but for some reason I didn't have an ounce of panic or fear left, as if it had drained out of me along with the blood from my head. I continued walking towards the car, seeing that the driver's door had once been opened but had fallen back, pressing on the leg of the corpse at the wheel. I circled around behind it curiously, looking through the gap to see a festering mess, held in place by the seat belt that hadn't saved whoever it had been from dying. A deflated air bag was draped over the corpse's lap, stained with the blood that had dripped from the wounds on its head and face. They may have been inflicted before the crash, before the poor soul had even started driving. Perhaps they had been trying desperately to escape their fate when blood had fallen into their eye from a bite, causing them to miss the turn and tumble off the road into the tree. Had they died instantly? Had someone else opened this door to find the corpse waiting? Or had they been able to open the door a little but not had the strength to push it against the gravity holding the car in the ditch, as it fell again and again on their leg, before they finally died of their wounds? Or had the dead creature that now lay where the person had died managed to somehow open the door of its own accord in the days and weeks it had been here? There was no way of knowing. The story was lost, blood in the rain. No one knew or cared, not even I, not any more. I felt numb, and not just physically.

  Its arms were trying to reach me as it twisted in its seat but the belt was still holding firm. I looked over the body to see the glove compartment was open, with one or two chocolate bars lying on a roadmap. It was better than nothing. I circled around the back of the car, finding the boot loaded with bags and survival equipment, clothes and photo albums, and even a cage holding the stiff remains of a bird that had long ago perished as its former owner had gnashed and wailed in the front seat. No return from the dead for the animal kingdom, not yet. There was also two petrol cans, fuel that I could give to Eliza as some sort of peace offering... no, it was a foolish notion. I had broken that bond irrevocably.

  I opened the passenger seat door and the body leaned over hungrily, fingers twisting and searching in the air for me. I was unconcerned, picking up the chocolate bars and the map and swatting the hands away before moving around to the back seat, opening the door and sitting down with my back to the corpse and unfolding the map onto my lap. The dead driver wailed as it tried to reach over its own shoulder awkwardly to get at me.

  “Hungry?” I asked as I glanced over to look, seeing the hands a good foot away from me even as it strained with all its remaining ragged muscles. It moaned in reply, seemingly excited by the sound of my voice.

  “Here you go,” I said, opening one of the chocolate bars and dangling it in front of the corpse's reaching fingers. It ignored it, still trying to get at me, as if it could pull me towards it by tethering the air around me.

  “Suit yourself,” I finished, taking a bite out of the bar and looking down at my lap.

  The red crayon lines that covered the map stood out vividly, like fresh cuts in flesh. I didn't even have enough energy to register surprise. I had thought my map was still at the station, forgotten amongst my old clothes... and maybe it was still there. Maybe there were many maps. Maybe all maps were pulling me back towards the hole that beckoned me, even glowing a little at the edges as I spotted it. I was close now, very close. The lines were all converging, seeming to move in front of my eyes like meal worms. The cross that marked where I was flickered and rippled as I watched.

  “Where do you think I'm going?” I asked, turning to the dead in the front seat. It s
till reached for me, dripping ichor from its fingertips. Even though I couldn't even be sure if it had been a man or a woman and despite the fact that it hungered for my exhausted flesh, at this moment it was the closest thing to a friend that I had. There was no reply save a continued groaning but as I glanced past the snapping jaws and rotting skull I looked up the hillside to see a tree, long dead with most of its branches gone, with the remains of a swing slowly swinging in the breeze, the seat hanging forlornly off the single remaining rope. A rush of familiarity came over me. I had been here before, many times. I could remember seeing the swing slowly falling into disrepair over the course of years, one side having snapped during a high wind.

  I got out of the car, walked to the centre of the road and looked around, left to right, scrutinising the landscape through the veil of rain. Yes, this was all familiar. As I closed my eyes to concentrate, more details somehow surfaced from my long dormant memory. They had been hiding under ice that was now beginning to crack, allowing them to float to the surface.

  The cross on the map was my location, the route was my route and I knew, somehow I now knew that around that corner to the right, beyond where this road joined a larger road, there lay my destination.

  I walked back towards the car to retrieve the map but it was gone, the half eaten chocolate bar sitting alone on the seat that was becoming sodden in the rain. Maybe it had never been there. Of course, I didn't need the map, not any more. I didn't need outside directions, pointers, signs. Part of me thought about searching through the boot of the car and picking out some useful things, but then... what did I need? I had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. Everyone I had met, I had driven away despite my best efforts. The harbour, the farmhouse, the town, the woods, the fall... it had all been for this, to bring me here.